CASINOS' OTHER WINNERS, LOSERS

Their amber glow shimmers in the night sky, softening the darkness and haunting the desert valley.

Sculpted from steel and glass, the casinos are canyons cradling miles of carpeting, green felt-top tables and flashing neon lights.

Each is more ambitious and imposing than the last. Three thousand workers here. Four thousand there. Thousands of hotel rooms, one floor after another.

Beyond them, construction booms-new roads, new strip malls, new communities that seem plucked off the shelves, sitting in the casinos' shadows.

This is the Pittsburgh of the 1990s, these casino factories.

This is a part of America's future, one that works for an estimated 150,000 casino workers across the U.S., though in some very different ways from the past.

The question is whether this is how millions of people want to spend their working lifetimes, and whether casinos will bring salvation to places such as Chicago and the dozens of other U.S. communities hungry for new jobs and revenues.

The answers are quite mixed.

For Las Vegas' glittering casino-factories do not offer most workers pensions or health-care benefits upon retiring. Most get little training, and many jobs dead-end in making beds, patrolling parking lots or cleaning pots.

Nor does job security exist for most non-union workers. People are fired at their bosses' whims, which is legal in Nevada. More than 40 percent of the casino workers here belong to unions, a rate nearly three times that for the rest of the nation's private workers, but still the unions fret about losing their short-term footholds.

But the casinos do offer something that wipes away most gripes: jobs.

Jobs that shelter Las Vegas from most economic woes and placed Nevada among the nation's leaders in job growth in recent years, according to the Nevada Employment Security Department.

Jobs with profitable, growing firms in a city where the unemployment rate was 5.6 percent in December and where casino operators actually fear they will fall short of the 15,000 workers needed for three casinos that will open by next year.

Indeed, the boom is forcing the mega-casinos' personnel departments to adjust to a new work world. "The human-resource people will have to rethink their role. They have never had to hire 5,000 to 6,000 at a time," says Adam Fine, editor of the Casino Journal of Nevada.

Roland Coleman, human relations director for Caesars World Inc., which has 13,000 employees in the U.S., says the casino job boom in Las Vegas and elsewhere in the country is forcing the industry to mature and accept its responsibilities.

"We are going to have to be like every other industry," he says. "We are not going to be isolated like we are in Las Vegas. As we move elsewhere, human issues become far more critical."

Like most casino executives, he also recites the casino-jobs-revenue mantra.

"Often we've heard that they are not `real' jobs, but I think they are essential jobs to our company, and we pay competitively," he says.

Most casino jobs pay more than what workers get for flipping hamburgers, though less than what they earn for running a factory machine.

"These casino jobs are pretty good for people without a college degree. You are getting better-than-average service jobs," says R. Keith Schwer, director of business and economic research at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

Someone without any skills can make a living.

An entry-level job making beds brings $8.95 an hour for a union member. For a non-union worker, it is closer to the minimum wage of $4.25, but wages vary widely, depending on a casino's size and success.

At Caesars Palace, officials say that the average wage for all workers is about $36,000 a year and that those who do not earn tips get about $25,000 a year.

If you work with high rollers and big tippers, as does Rose Brandt, 41, a roulette and blackjack dealer at Caesars, then you have a dream job.

Fourteen years ago she was recently divorced, earning close to the minimum wage as a bank's head cashier. "I make as much as some lawyers back east," she says with a coy smile. That is not bad for someone with only a high school degree, she adds.

And, like Detroit's auto plants, Chicago's packing houses and Los Angeles' defense plants once upon a time, the factory-casinos here swallow more and more workers dreaming of following in Brandt's footsteps or, more simply, just keeping their families together.

They come from everywhere.

Isabel Beltrandy-Henry's family came from Cuba via Chicago to Las Vegas more than 13 years ago. In Chicago, her father was a warehouse worker and her mother a factory worker. Today, not only do both of them work in the casinos, but so do eight other relatives. She is a secretary at Local 226 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union.

"If you do your work and save you can buy a house and live a decent life here," she says. Perfect English isn't always needed, either, she adds.

Clutching similar dreams, new hopefuls arrive daily.

"It is slow now, Joe, but call me again in a while," John Napolitano, a former cook and now a dispatcher for cooks in Local 226's hiring hall, says over the telephone late one afternoon.

"I have people calling from Chicago, Detroit. You name it," he says.

Across town, the stack of applications facing Linda McCord, president of All Jobs Employment Agency, is chock full of new arrivals from Michigan, California, Utah, Maine, Illinois and Iowa. They are mostly low-skill or blue-collar workers-full of unreal hopes, she says, for high-paying jobs.

At best, she expects to place most of them as security guards, change carriers or receptionists in the casinos, or in other jobs elsewhere. Their starting wages will be $6 to $8 an hour.

"There's work here," she advises, "but not big jobs. It's the little jobs."

There are other disappointments in gambling's desert citadel.

Lingering in the casinos' back rooms and low-income black and Latino neighborhoods is a potent emotion: a burning resentment that the casinos' best-paying jobs are mostly held by whites.

"We don't have the key positions. We have the cooks and bellmen," says Wanda Mathews, a casino cook whose family came from Louisiana and who tried unsuccessfully to keep her three daughters from casino work, saying it was not for them.

To be sure, beginning in 1971 the casinos faced a U.S. Justice Department order to increase their hiring and promotion of blacks, women and Hispanics. By 1989, however, the order was rescinded, says John Peck, an attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The casinos had met most of the obligations for women and Hispanics, but they still fell shy for black workers. "We concluded they had made good-faith efforts," Peck says.

At Caesars Palace blacks make up 13 percent of the work force, but they fill one-fourth of the lowest-paying positions and only 7 percent of the highest-paying jobs. Caesars' Coleman, who is black, insists his company is committed to putting more blacks in high-ranking positions.

"We have become more enlightened," he says.

Ironically, many of those with the good jobs-the dealers, bartenders, cocktail waitresses and others who get hefty tips-complain about the price they must pay: the boredom, stress and frustration of dealing with customers management says are never wrong, even if they are drunk and abusive.

And casino work is demanding in other ways.

You need an emotional shield when taking away other people's money, dealers say, so you do not become jealous at the high rollers' wealth or too sympathetic to the small-time losers.

And because of the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week work life, nearly all casino workers say they have to learn to adjust baby-sitters' hours, meal schedules, family gatherings, and, if possible, body rhythms.

In a business in which youth, good looks and sex appeal can matter greatly, workers may also try to beat the odds with medical help.

Tony Badillo, 60, who has been a dealer for 35 years, worries about workers who get old and can't hang on to their high-paying jobs.

"They (the casinos) don't respect age, sex or seniority," complains Badillo, a blackjack dealer at the Sands Hotel and Casino. It also bothers him that dealers let go from one casino start at the lowest seniority when hired elsewhere.

He heads the Nevada Casino Dealers Association, a 4-year-old group with only 3,000 members out of Nevada's 45,000 dealers. Their group was inspired by the 1983 firing by the Las Vegas Hilton of 37 dealers.

The dealers took the Hilton to court, claiming they were fired to cover up a money-skimming operation and were replaced by younger workers, most of them attractive women.

A federal judge in Las Vegas awarded them $45 million, but an appeals court overturned much of the ruling in 1992, saying Nevada law allows employers to fire workers at will. The dealers did receive nearly $5 million on their age- and sex-discrimination claims, says attorney Brian Berman.

While Las Vegas casinos have not staged any major layoffs of older dealers since, Badillo says dealers still are unprotected against many actions by the casinos.

They also aren't protected from job stress and burnout. The casino operators disagree, but William Thompson, a professor of public administration at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, thinks the workers have a case.

"They are in very pressured jobs, where they can't give back and they can't escape," says Thompson. "They come in here (the university) with a scheme for a business, and when we ask them what they do for a living, they say they've been at it for 18 years or so, but in their minds it is temporary."

"We get a lot of dead-end jobs," says Jim Arnold, secretary-treasurer of Local 226. "Let's say you are a cocktail waitress or a porter. Where can you go from there? We have a lot of people who've been in the same jobs for 30 years."

His union set up the process for its first training program with the casinos in 1989, requiring them to pay 2 cents an hour per worker. But the program has yet to get off the ground because of long-delayed negotiations between the union and the casinos.

The way most casino officials look at it, however, training is not a priority. Casino workers pull themselves up by their bootstraps, the officials say. They learn the ropes, become apprentices, take whatever classes are offered.

"Most people in this company start out at entry level and move up," says Glenn Schaeffer, president and chief financial officer of Circus Circus Enterprises Inc., considered in Las Vegas to be one of the most benevolent casinos to its workers.

A prime example of the way people rise from the ranks, says Shaeffer, is James W. Muir, Circus Circus chief operating officer and executive vice president.

"Jim started as a bellhop," says Schaeffer, whose 19-year-old firm had a $103 million profit in 1991 and expects to expand by 4,000 workers, to 18,000, in Nevada, making it the state's largest private employer.

His firm, Hilton Hotels and Caesars World spent a total of $5 million last year on a losing bid to try to convince Illinois politicians to approve casino gambling in Chicago.

Despite his preaching about self-made people, however, Schaeffer, a former stockbroker, public relations official and Ramada Corp. vice president for financial affairs, represents the industry's latest trend. As the casinos become mega-factories run by large corporations, they are increasingly run by people with his training.

The workers have noticed. On one recent day, it was almost noon at the bar at the Horseshoe casino, and Tom, a veteran, middle-age dealer with short, dark hair, was nursing some beers before going home. His friend, an elderly dealer, snoozed on the next stool.

A former warehouse worker in Massachusetts, Tom likes his job, the pay and the life he has led. But he is also full of complaints, and most of them are about the way casinos have become big companies.

There is so much more pressure, says Tom, who would not give his last name. He can put up with it, he insists as he swivels around in his seat, because he is "an old-timer"-but the younger dealers cannot.

"Now they want you to be a machine. They want perfection," he grumbles. "You have no time for public relations with the customers. It's move, move, move. You can't make a mistake.